Stephan Clark - Sweetness #9

“Perfectly?” Priscilla said.

“Well, ‘generally’ might be the better word.”

Now it was Betty who echoed me: “Generally?”

I glanced to the front of the restaurant, where a man at the register was pointing Ernest toward the stash of ketchup packets by the soda fountain. “That’s the language the federal government uses when approving a new food additive for use,” I said. “They say it’s Generally Recognized As Safe.”

“Have they ever been wrong?” Priscilla asked.

I snorted and looked to Betty, as if she might agree that this was no way to go through life, with such a depressingly negative attitude. But my wife sat there with her utensils suspended over her de-bunned Quarter Pounder, waiting for my answer no less anxiously than our daughter.

After sneaking another glance at Ernest — he was now coming toward us with a fistful of ketchup packets — I spoke in a hurried whisper. “Well, Red Dye No. 3 was pulled a few years ago when the FDA learned it caused tumors in the thyroids of male rats, but they were overly cautious, if you ask me. You could withstand a lifetime of exposure and the risk would still only be something like one in one hundred thousand. And that’s for cancer,” I told my daughter, “not verblessness.”

Betty smiled brightly as Ernest sat down. “Found some?” she said.

He shrugged and nodded, then began biting off the corners of his packets and squirting ketchup into the bottom of his Big Mac container.

Priscilla slumped down in her chair, looking off toward the sprawling Playland connected to the restaurant. Ronald McDonald had appeared, to the delight of a small scrum of children. Priscilla shook her head. “What does it say that I learned about him before I’d ever heard about Jesus?”

Betty fixed her with one of the looks she’d learned in business school.

“What?” Priscilla said. “I can’t talk about Jesus now?”

“You can talk about Jesus in the proper place and at the proper time. Right now we’re at the dinner table.”

“This is McDonald’s.”

“And we’re eating dinner.”

“Can you at least hurry up? It is fast food, isn’t it?”

Ernest raised a finger to ask for our patience, then said, after he’d swallowed a mouthful of fries, “The average American family? Six minutes at the dinner table. Fact.”

“Six?”

“How’d you learn that?”

“The Times. ”

“Speaking of counting,” Priscilla said, “did you see the sign out front? ‘Billions and billions served.’ They used to keep track. It used to say ‘Fifty billion served.’ ‘Seventy-five billion.’ Now they’re like, ‘Why bother? We’re just gonna kill ’em all anyway.’ They should put up a sign saying how many are left. ‘Seventy-five billion cows to go.’ ‘Fifty billion.’ They could do the same with acres of the rain forest.”

Betty glanced at her watch. “If we hurry, we just might be able to finish in five minutes.” With this, she slashed at her burger with her plastic utensils, and Priscilla sank still lower in her chair, propelled by her ninety-ninth sigh of the day. Ernest burped. And so this is it, I thought. This is The Family Leveraux. The one in a constant battle with her weight, the other so generally dissatisfied with life, and the third so small and apparently verbless.

I sent my eyes out the picture window, watching as the man in garish yellow pantaloons performed in front of the kids like a demented Marcel Marceau. Maybe it was the fact that he was in a glass room surrounded by glass walls that brought to mind the communal glass tank in which I’d once placed my rats in Animal Testing; maybe it was the fact that we’d listened to those agitators on AM radio in the morning, or that Priscilla’s thinking had started leading my own. I can’t say for sure what did it, nor was I expansive about this in my pocket diary the following evening, when I jotted down only one line: It’s happening again, isn’t it? But as I looked back to my family, the tagline of a commercial years removed from the airwaves bubbled up to the forefront of my memory. Now with Sweetness #9. It was as unforgettable as my name or social security number. Now with Sweetness #9.

My hand jumped out, fluttering in the direction of Betty’s cup of diet cola. “You know, sugar’s flavor profile is much more well rounded than what you’ve got in there. It resembles a nicely designed bell curve, whereas that”—I cleared my throat—“that sugary artificial, it…it flattens your cola more than flavors it.”

Betty reached for one of my fries (she’d insisted she didn’t want her own order) and answered with a practiced smile. “I prefer the taste. You know that.”

Priscilla reached into the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt for her pencil and that reporter’s notebook she never went without. “What’s this all about?” she said. “Why are you championing the natural over the artificial?”

“What? Am I doing that?”

She flipped to a clean page and pushed the tip of her No. 2 into the paper. I heard a tiny snap. The tip? It might as well have been my life.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Sarin and I spent the day planning out the editorial calendar for the fall. We’re gonna do a think-piece on the cafeteria. Maybe a series.”

“A think-piece?” Did the floor pull away beneath me, like sand running out with the tide? Did people stop and point to a big wave rolling in from the horizon, not yet understanding how tall and overpowering it would grow? “What do you mean?”

“Is Sweetness #9 dangerous?” she said. “Why else would you tell Mom to stop drinking her soda?”

I smiled as if this were an absurd scenario, and in many ways it was. I had once believed the Washington Post would expose all of my efforts at suppression and my many lies of omission; now I realized it was a call from the fact-checker at my daughter’s high school’s paper that I should fear.

I spoke to Betty instead of Priscilla. “I was only saying maybe we’re at the age where we should give ourselves over to the joys of the sugar-cane. Mmm? We turned our backs on margarine, didn’t we? Retreated to the saturated pleasures of the cow.”

“What were the results of the tests you ran, Dad?”

It was Priscilla. She wouldn’t let it go. Still, I kept my eyes on Betty. “Is it rude to turn down an interview request from your own daughter?”

Betty sipped from her straw. “Not at the dinner table, no.”

“C’mon, Dad. Just answer the question.”

My trunk stiffened. Priscilla, an instinctive journalist, fed me silence as if it were a length of rope with which I could hang myself.

“What makes you think I’m withholding something?”

“That twitch in your eye.”

I reached for it.

“I’ll find out one way or another,” she said, “and as with every story, some people will come off sympathetically, while others”—she shrugged—“less so.”

I held back a smile. A little Nixonian, no different from her father. “Are you at least willing to let me speak off the record?”

“Are you saying you know something?”

Betty reached for my chocolate shake.

“Because if you’re willing to let me go on background—”

“You said ‘off the record.’”

“—I’ll give you what you want. But if you just want to run a fool out in between quotation marks, you’ll have to get it in dribs and drabs like everyone else.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“I’m British. Doesn’t she understand I’m British?”

“Stop playing with her, David.”

“E, tell your sister the direct approach won’t work with me.” I sat back, bouncing one finger in the air. “Though I do like the idea of coming clean in the pages of The Campus Crier. Why didn’t I think of this before? All the therapeutic value of confession, but with none of the public embarrassment. What’s your circulation again?”